Chapter 2
Hermione wouldn’t be Hermione if she hadn’t dived into research the moment she woke up the next day. But it was futile. She’d already read everything that had been published on memory charms several times over in the month leading up to her failure. She had nothing. She could only assume that she’d waited too long. That she’d taken so many core memories that her parents had become almost different people.
Hermione wouldn’t be Hermione if she just gave up. But maybe she wasn’t Hermione anymore. Maybe the war had damaged her so much… losing her parents had damaged her so much that she was now fundamentally different. Hermione Granger… brightest witch of her age, war hero… and now without a family. Alone. She just felt so alone.
“You’ve got family, Hermione,” Ron had said when she’d tried to explain the deep emptiness she felt. “You’ve got Harry and me. And you’ve got the whole Weasley clan, Merlin knows there’s enough of us to go around.”
She hadn’t known how to explain that it wasn’t the same. So she had given him a weak smile and gotten out of bed to pretend to read on the sofa.
She was doing that a lot lately. Pretending. It had taken her a few weeks but she was at the point now where she could sit at a dinner table and smile and nod in the ways she knew would stop people from questioning her. From singling her out as wrong or broken.
She had tried to talk to Harry about it. He’d always been alone. Maybe he would understand that feeling that – as much as she loved him – she knew Ron just couldn’t.
But his advice had been Ron’s regurgitated.
“They weren’t your only family. You’ve got us. You’ll always have us.”
But that wasn’t what it was about. She didn’t know how to put it into words, but that wasn’t what it was about.
“Hermione, can you pass the salt?” Ginny’s voice rang like a gong, slicing through her thoughts.
“Sure, here.” Make eye contact. Smile.
She was at another of the Weasley lunches. She tried to enjoy them, she really did, but they were so loud. And so chaotic. With everyone talking at once she couldn’t even make out the words most of the time. And it was so exhausting, pretending she was ok. Pretending that she was looking forward to going back to school. She didn’t know if she had the ability to look forward to things anymore. It was like a cloud was smothering her. Not making her miserable, exactly, but numb. There was no joy in the things there used to be joy in. But she suspected her cloud was stopping her from feeling the full extent of the grief. It was a reaction from a paranoid immune system, protecting her from what it thought would break her. Maybe it would break her, when the cloud finally lifted.
After lunch, Hermione volunteered to help with the dishes. Mostly because the boys were planning a quidditch match outside and she didn’t want to be roped into acting as referee.
“I’ll help too!” Ginny said, surprisingly.
Harry groaned, complaining that she would be gone in a few weeks and then it would be months before they could ‘whip Ron’s sorry arse’ together again. But she deflected, citing a headache. Harry, ever chivalrous, located a pain potion in the Weasley’s cabinet and nearly forced it down Ginny’s grumbling throat.
As they were making their way through the piles of plates Ginny asked, “So… you’ve gotten your letter, right? What did it say?”
Hermione had indeed received her yearly Hogwarts letter a few days ago. It had explained that there were enough students returning that the eighth years would be separated from the seventh years, and told her the subjects that were available to the eighth years for N.E.W.T. study. For logistical purposes, she’d been asked to tick the boxes of all the subjects she wanted to take and send the form back by owl. She’d ticked all of the subjects she’d been taking in sixth year – sniffing with derision at the option for N.E.W.T. level Divination – and was about to fold it up when she’d noticed it. Muggle Studies.
There was no point, really. But she was curious. What would it look like in a seventh – eighth – year curriculum? She remembered her third year class being full of completely outdated content. They had learnt about telegrams, and the professor hadn’t known what a cell phone was. Would the war have changed how they taught the subject? Would the professor still be a pureblood who saw muggles as fascinating but… foreign? Impossible to understand?
She had ticked the box without much further thought.
“They just said that there would be separate classes for seventh and eighth years, and asked me to choose which ones I wanted to take.”
“Rightio, yeah mine was pretty much the same…”
Hermione made a noise of acknowledgment and returned to washing her plate.
“Except… they made me head girl.”
Hermione looked up in surprise. She’d completely forgotten about things like that. Come to think of it, she hadn’t even gotten a renewed prefect badge like she had in sixth year.
“Oh… Congratulations.”
“You’re not mad are you?” said Ginny sheepishly.
Hermione let out a small, breathy laugh. “Why would I be mad?”
“Well… I mean… You were the obvious choice. Everyone’s been expecting it since your first year. I’m sure they only gave it to me on a technicality. Maybe they just can’t give the position to eighth years.”
“Ginny, I don’t mind… I’m-” She took a moment to process. How did she feel? “I’m… relieved, actually.” Yes, that was it. That was what the lightness in her chest was.
“Relieved?”
“Well, I guess I was kind of worried about how differently people were going to treat me this year. After… y’know. I just kind of want to slip into the shadows a bit. Just be an ordinary student. And besides, it’ll be nice not having to patrol corridors for hours on my spare evenings.”
Ginny smiled and sighed in relief. Hermione hadn’t noticed the tension earlier, but now saw the shift in Ginny’s body language as she leaned against the bench, relaxed.
“Well, that’s a relief. I was worried it was going to come between us.”
“No, don’t worry, we’re sticking together this year. Even if we are in separate classes.”
Ginny smiled at her. “That’s good to know. It’s going to be hard being away from Harry. You think I’d be used to it by now but… I guess that now we’re finally together, and everything’s finally ok, it’s more annoying than terrifying. And that’s somehow… worse? Sorry, it sounds stupid, I know.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid. I’ll miss them both too.”
“Oh, you really should come home for the holidays this year. You’ll break Mum’s heart if you don’t. You’re part of the family now,” Ginny said.
Hermione’s chest only clenched a little at the mention of family. It wasn’t the same. She might think of Ginny as a sister in some ways, but they hadn’t grown up together. Hadn’t ridden to school together. Hadn’t called grandma for Christmas together. She’d spent so long adjusting to the wizarding world and this family, but they’d never adjusted to her. She felt like a bit of an alien sometimes. An alien who had gotten very good at playing human. So good that no one even noticed she wasn’t one of them anymore.
But she knew, deep down, that she wasn’t. No amount of love and care from the Weasleys could coax this feeling out of her. They didn’t even understand what the feeling was.
“I think I’ve just figured out why I’m struggling so much to get over my parents.”
“Of course you’re struggling, Hermione. It’s horrible.” Said Ginny, putting a comforting arm around her.
“No but… it’s more than just losing them. I’ve been feeling so alone, and so different. Ron and Harry keep telling me you’re my family – and you are,” she quickly added as she saw Ginny’s mouth opening, “but I just realised that the reason it doesn’t feel the same is that we grew up so differently. I feel so… out of place in the wizarding world sometimes. I think maybe I always have.”
Hermione didn’t realise the extent of the truth in that statement until she’d already said it. But it was true. She had always felt out of place, in some way. That’s part of why she had tried so hard. Why she had felt this deep need to know everything there was to know about this new world she was to belong to. Maybe her research could make up for being born an outsider. And now her parents were gone, she felt like she was stuck in this new world with no way back. She was a tree whose roots had been abruptly and painfully severed, after having lived so long in the sun that she’d forgotten they were there.
“Hermione, you’re not out of place. You’re the brightest witch of your age for Merlin’s sake! You can’t tell me you believe that nonsense about muggleborns stealing magic, can you?”
“Of course not! But it’s not about that… It’s like… Like I’ve been separated from an entire part of mysel-”
“But you’re a witch, Hermione. You can’t just not be a witch. We fought that war so that people like you could live their lives in peace, and now you’re saying you don’t want that?”
“No… no that’s not what I’m saying. It’s just… I don’t know…”
How could she explain this feeling she had? This ache for home, for belonging, for easy understanding.
“Maybe you’re right. I’m sorry. It was silly. I think I’m just still upset about my parents.”
***
Hermione didn’t know if the rush of chaos that had been her dream counted as a nightmare, but it had unsettled her. And so she rose, dressed and was sipping her earl grey as the kitchen clock ticked around to 4:30.
She tried to calm herself, focusing on the warmth of the tea, but her mind felt like a jumbled mess after the dream. Like it was moving too fast, but it was underwater and she couldn’t make anything out. It was beyond frustrating. Maybe she was just still too tired to think. Maybe she needed more caffeine…
As she walked the pre-dawn streets of muggle London she looked on them with a new light. She loved being a witch, she loved magic, she loved the wonder and endless surprises of the wizarding world. But some small part of her, she was slowly realising, missed the simplicity of the muggle one. The rigid logic, the anonymity.
She was about to walk into a café she’d been frequenting over the past month when she saw him. He was unmistakable with his white-blonde hair. Even then, she had to look twice. That couldn’t be Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy didn’t loiter around in muggle cafés. He didn’t wear muggle clothes. And he didn’t look… so haggard, unshaven and unkept, with dark circles underlining his eyes. Ever. Even in the photos from his trial, he had been impeccably presented.
He wasn’t loitering though. He was slowly but surely sipping away at a coffee. And sitting in her spot by the bookcase. What.
Before she’d had time to process the image, the strange Malfoy-esque figure – who couldn’t be Malfoy – looked up and met her eyes. His mouth opened in shock before he ducked his head, looking like he was in some sort of pain. As he downed the last of his coffee and stood up, Hermione fled on some sort of instinct. He was going to come out of the café. Would he try to talk to her? She didn’t have the mental capacity for that right now. Not with her underwater brain.
So ten minutes later she was back in the familiar kitchen of Grimmauld Place, sipping sub-par instant coffee and wondering what on earth Malfoy had been doing in muggle London.